Today is more and more about personal health and those who know me a bit are aware I like gadgets. When I became an Addapp labs member a while ago, I got to chance to try out the Beddit sleep monitor. The Beddit sensor tracks your sleep quality, heart rate, and breathing under the sheets, while you sleep. Basically it is a strap that you have to put on your mattress and then it sends the measure data to the Bedditt app on your smartphone. With the light and noise sensors of your mobile device your sleep analysis is enriched. My conclusion was that the Bedditt sleep monitor gives you a quite accurate, even scientific insight into how you sleep.

The thing that I disliked about the Bedditt, was that you need to have your phone on all night and Bluetooth up and the Beddit needs to be plugged in a wall socket. It takes some time to set this up each night, and when I sleep I have my phone in airplane mode so that nobody can interrupt me and it saves battery also. Let’s say it is not that user-friendly. Also, the strap got off the mattress in meantime.

Today I am using FitBit to monitor my sleep. The FitBit Charge is a really simple activity tracker. It lits up and shows me the time when I look at it, which makes it really intuitive to use. Other data points are steps walked, distance covered, calories burnt and stairs taken.

I wear the Charge on my non-dominant wrist. You hardly feel it sits there and the strap is soft and feels good. The FitBit device is very effective in what it does and there are actually no dislikes. The battery lasts the entire week and that is pretty amazing in my opinion. The Charge doesn’t interfere with my daily activities but is part of it.

What I like most about it is that it improves my productivity. It pushes me to go out and empty the trash, to use my car less et cetera so that I can obtain my daily target. A cool feature is that it lets you track your exercise too while running or biking, so that I don’t have to wear my TomTom all the time. Perhaps an integrated GPS would have been fine, but that’s not what the Charge was designed for. It remains an activity tracker.

The data also seems to be quite accurate. As for my sleep monitoring, it rightly measures when I go to sleep and when I wake up. The only thing that is not near the truth is the times I am restless. This is logical, because it doesn’t measure brainwaves. If you really want to improve your sleep quality, go for the Bedditt or even better: get yourself examined by a doctor.

I think the guys at FitBit also did a great job at visualizing the data. The app is user friendly. There’s a whole lot of analytics, allowing you to essentially manage your wellbeing and maximize your performance. I am a happy user!

Over the weekend a blog post on Mashable about eyewear technology got my attention. Augmented reality glasses are hot!

It was through an interview by Robert Scoble that I learnt about a company called Meta. I hadn’t really talked about them and now feels like a good time. I like people with big, crazy ideas and the folks over at Californian-based startup do exactly this.

Meta is building the SpaceGlasses. It can do a while lot more than Google Glass (the screen oss said to boast 15 times the display area of Google Glass) and it’s trendy. Wearing the device creates a hologram-like display that users can sort through with their hands, similar to the technology seen in Iron Man and Minority Report. So you can manipulate virtual objects with your bare hands, or view informational overlays on top of your surroundings. Apparently you can also create 3D scans of objects too. Imagine the possibilities!

The glasses are a two-part system: one half 3D output display, and one half 3D scanner. The output display allows the user to see holograms — say, an image or computer file — and the scanner scans the environment and tells the computer where to place the graphics relative to the wearer. Pretty exciting if you ask me.

So I just downloaded Splunk and I’m getting hands on my MacBook Pro! It was during an IT Service Management training that I first heard of Splunk. No wonder as it has its roots in the IT shop and I met such folks there.

Splunk is a platform for operational intelligence. It processes data and streams, coming from different places. Just like in an IT department where you have tons of servers generating massive amounts of data. So if there’s an interruption for instance, Splunk helps you find find the needle in the haystack. Splunk can help custom reps for instance to mine through the big data.

From another perspective, splunk is also a platform. It’s like a whole set op APIs. It also offers a JavaScript SDK that a front end developer or node developer can build on. And it gets even better: with the web framework toolkit, you can extend splunk’s dashboard features.

Splunk got my interest as it seems to offer lots and lots of goodness for the Web — it’s build on HTML5, Django, Jquery for visualization et cetera. Stuff that a typical Javascript engineer is comfortable with.

Splunk seems to understand that a lot of data nowadays (Internet of Things) is generated in JSON and that JavaScript works a good platform for this. This doesn’t require you to have classess, methods and properties, but allows you to work with loose information directly.

Disclaimer

The content posted on this blog is publically available to all on the Internet. The opinions, subjects and ramblings expressed here, represent my own views and are in no way associated with my employer.